"Where the Wild Things Are" movie pics

Coolest thing I've ever seen? Probably. The Dave Eggers-penned film finally comes out in October, and the trailer debuts this Friday in front of Monsters vs. Aliens.





See more at FilmDrunk

Twitter for Musicians Pt 1: The Basics

On the eve of so many excellent Philly bands releasing new albums this summer, I've noticed that none of them has a Twitter account. That's a real shame, so here's a how-to (and, more importantly, why-to) guide to using Twitter as a tool for promoting your music.


Twitter is a microblogging service that mimics Facebook's "Status Update" feature: users create 140-character "tweets" and add Followers who are automatically fed these messages via Twitter.com or text messages.

You can also reply to other users (@UserName), send a private Direct Message (D UserName) or start and follow topics (check out #ModernFairy and #LitDish -- both awesome).

At first glance it seems like just another place for personal updates that no one cares about, but if you use it to announce things other than "I am eating a baloney sandwich - ACK!", it's a really powerful (and mobile) real-time marketing device. It attracts tens of thousands of new users each month, and it has grown more than 600% in the last 12 months.
Read "Twitter - the next big source of blog traffic" for more about setting up an account.

Why Musicians Need Twitter:

1. Your fans are already on Twitter
...and so are the journalists and bloggers who review your albums. Trust me, you'll be surprised by how many people you know on here. A simple search using TwitterSearch will also show you all the tweets containing your name - a great place to start adding followers who are already interested your music.

(You should already be receiving automatic updates from Google whenever your name is dropped in news, blogs, videos or other groups - if not, set them up at Google Alerts)

2. Twitter works with your cell phone
Let's say you just finished your sound check and no one has shown up for a gig. Simply send a tweet via text to 40404, and Twitter can notify all your followers that they are missing the best show of your career! Better yet, if they have your profile set up for notifications, it will send an alert to their cell phone.

If you're a touring musician or stuck in the studio, Twitter is a great way to get around spotty Internet access and a lack of time to update your website. Simply text updates from the road and have them fed into your other online profiles.

Services like TwitPic are also great for instantly uploading photos from the road, right from your phone. That burrito you ate with Lyle Lovett? Show everyone in just a few minutes!

3. Twitter integrates with your other social networking services
You can set Twitter to automatically change your Facebook status to your latest tweet, or use a service like TwitterFeed and allow Twitter to automatically tweet your latest blog post, Flickr upload, show calendar update and more.

When I publish this post, Twitter will automatically create a tweet entitled "Twitter for Musicians Pt 1" with a link to this blog (check it out here). At the same time, Twitter will change my Facebook status to the title of that tweet. My Twitter account also imports my latest GoodReads updates, Blip.fm updates and my shared Google Reader items - it saves me tons of time, and it makes sure that my friends who are on Twitter but not Facebook / mailing lists / near a computer can get the same info as everyone else in real time.

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Still not sold? Just take my word for it, set up an account, check out the articles below, and Part II will go into much more detail about integrating Twitter with your other online marketing outlets. And follow me on Twitter when you get there!

• How To Use Twitter for Music Promotion
  
  
• Twitter For Musicians and Bands: A How-To Guide
  
  
• Musicians’ Guide to Rocking Twitter
  

Blues Animations - Robert Johnson & Leadbelly

A follow-up to yesterday's post about Poetry Animations. Both seem to respond to the actual sound waves, with the artist's lips moving in response to any volume shifts -- obviously it's a lot more effective with poetry readings, since Robert Johnson is "singing" all of his guitar stops (the blinking is a nice and very eerie touch, however). Here are some of the best:

Leadbelly "Looky look yonder" Blues movie animation
Uploaded by bluesanimations

Robert Johnson "Phonograph "Blues"Movie Animation
Uploaded by bluesanimations

From Jim Clark, aka Blues Animations on DailyMotion.com

SeatKarma.com - Concert Seating Finder

Finally, democracy for concert seating! SeatKarma.com, where "no two tickets are the same," gives users the ability to view all available seats for a show.

"SeatKarma’s search engine covers 99% of tickets available for purchase online by retrieving live ticket information from a couple of hundred secondary market ticket brokers. The cost comparison is then augmented with venue mapping available for approximately 1600 venues. 1300 of these are “live maps” which place a marker on the section where the seat will be located. The remaining 300 are small venues such as bars where seat mapping doesn’t apply. The company claims it now has more live maps than any other comparison engine on the market." (from TechCrunch.com)

I just bought tickets for the Clapton / Winwood show in Philly and spent 20 minutes in an Internet queue wondering what (if any) seats were still available. Never again!

Popular Penguins: Retro Penguin Books Styling

I'm a sucker for punchy, to-the-point design, and old paperbacks from the early 60s are a great example. Penguin's division in Australia recently started re-issuing a collection of classic and modern books with the retro cover treatment, and sales have more than doubled their projections.

I love any story where books sell well -- take a look:

clipped from network.nationalpost.com The series of 50 books - 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction were redesigned to recall Penguin's first paperbacks, published in the 30s. Then, the softcovers were colour coded - orange books were fiction, blue for non-fiction. The new retro Penguins all carry the same orange cover. "If you're standing looking at those books you know subconsciously or by implication that all of these books are going to be OK," said Peter Blake, the company's Australian sales director who conceived the idea of the series. "Even if you've not heard of Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity you think, 'It's part of the collection, I trust the brand and it's surrounded by all these other classics by authors like Waugh or Fitzgerald so it must be OK.' " To have a look at the entire series, visit Popular Penguins.

Dead Poets Society, the Animated Series

Very cool stuff, and more than a little bit creepy - check out T.S. Eliot, Christina Rossetti and James Joyce below.

clipped from network.nationalpost.com Poetry Animations is a YouTube channel put together by British videographer Jim Clarke. His project animated old images of famous to make it appear as if they are reading their poems. Some of the recordings are the poet's reading their works. Where archived readings were unavailable, they are voiced by other readers.

TiVo Guilt, Opportunity Costs and more

A brief explanation about 3 months without a blog post: dedicating this blog to music alone is just too limiting. Call it a byproduct of my job navigating the Internet, call it my background in Literature, call it my undying quest for fun-yet-useless facts and articles, but this blog needs to start thinking outside the box of "local music."

Part of my frustration in updating is below: TiVo guilt (or in my case Bookmarking and Google Reader guilt) is what happens when technology gives you seemingly unlimited content choices, but time and the need to sleep give you only so many hours in a day to absorb what you've collected.

I definitely suffer from this, but hopefully the content changes here will alleviate some of that. Does anyone else have this problem? Maybe you've bookmarked 30 sites about Garfield minus Garfield but you don't have time to keep up every day?

clipped from www.cnn.com "Economists call this 'opportunity costs,' " explains Berens. "You're sitting there and you have to weigh, well, 'I have to watch this thing, because I promised myself when I told TiVo ... I want the whole season of that! Go get it! And go get things like it!' And so you've committed to this decision and it's a burden -- suddenly your relaxation has turned into more work." "With infinite media, you have infinite choices, and therefore you have infinite opportunity costs," he says. "Your satisfaction index of the thing you actually choose can never be equivalent to the infinite opportunity costs, so we're in this position of being behind the cognitive eight-ball all the time."

Devon Sproule Interview Pt II

So I stand by my earlier statement: This blog is about musical discovery, not criticism, so I'll leave you with a bevy of Devon Sproule songs and links and let you figure things out for yourself.

Devon Sproule Interview Pt II from Ian Messinger on Vimeo.

Devon Sproule & Paul Curreri - "You Can Leave Your Hat On" -- Download now!

• Paul Curreri & Devon Sproule Valentine Duets - 5 free albums!
  
  
  Devon Sproule's recent listens:
  


• Matt Curreri & the Exfriends on MySpace


• Jacqueline Stemm on MySpace


• Mantler on MySpace

I will say that you'd be a fool not to already own Devon's Keep Your Silver Shined, seeing as its one of the best records I've picked up in the last two years. Confident, relaxed, accessible and terrifying in its execution once you realize how young Devon is and what a fantastic musical future she has ahead of her.